Rabbi Benjamin Shull of Woodcliff Lake, New Jersey knows Jewish divorces. In addition to performing these ceremonies for members of his congregation, he has had one of his own. “If a couple is married in a Jewish ceremony, it should end in a Jewish ceremony as well,” he says. “There was nothing negative [about the process]. It was a way of saying I was done with that chapter of my life and it was helping me to begin to move on.”

Rabbi Shull and his wife Ethel were married for more than 11 years. Through both his observations and participation, he believes the whole procedure is focused on legality, not religion.

“It is long on ritual rite, short on processing of emotion. But this is a good thing to some degree,” he says. “Divorce, the ending of a marriage, is sometimes akin to mourning, and some may not want to tap into those emotions.”

But is divorce acceptable in the eyes of Judaism? What happens to the estimated 30 percent of Jewish couples whose marriages are not working? Just as there are rules for the start of matrimony, so too are there laws for its ending.

The Torah says in Deuteronomy 24:1, “When a man takes a wife and marries her, if then she finds no favor in his eyes because he has found some indecency in her, and he writes her a certificate of divorce and puts it in her hand and sends her out of his house.”

From this passage, the rabbis developed a divorce procedure in which the husband must give consent, and the woman is given a legal document known as a Get. According to Rabbi Jonathan Reiss of the Beth Din of America, one of the nation’s preeminent Jewish courts, the procedure for divorce dates back to the

rabbis of the Talmud. The process must be done in front of a Beit Din, or Jewish court. The Get is written in a mixture of Hebrew and Aramaic and must be written by a special scribe in perfect handwriting, without any smudges. There is a standard twelveline form, and only the names and dates change in each circumstance.

Overall, the one- to two-hour-long divorce procedure is fairly simple. The parties must appear before a rabbi who is well-versed in the laws of divorce, a scribe and two witnesses. The husband must request that a scribe write the Get for his wife in his special quill pen.

Next, both the husband and wife declare that they are giving the Get of their own free will and have the two witnesses sign the form. After both parties confirm they want the divorce, the husband drops the Get directly into his wife’s cupped hands.

“This is your Get, and accept this as your Get. You shall therewith be divorced from me, you are untied, and permitted to any man,” he tells her.

The wife then places the Get under her arm, turns her back and moves several steps away to symbolically leave her husband. The officiating rabbi takes the Get from the now ex-wife and tears it crosswise. She is then given a Divorce Certificate to prove her newly divorced status.

But what happens if the husband and wife can’t bear to be in the presence of one another? Then the Get can be completed with a proxy in place of either spouse.

But even though divorce is mentioned in the Torah and obtaining a legal Jewish divorce is a commandment, divorce is still looked on with disfavor. In the Talmud it says, “Even God shares tears when anyone divorces his wife.”

“Divorce, like an amputation, is a tragedy,” says Rabbi Aron Moss, an Orthodox rabbi in Sydney, Australia, on AskMoses.com. “But sometimes it’s the right thing to do.”

For a woman, receiving the Get can be a powerful experience, Shull says.

“The basic message is that an arrangement is over. You tried your best, and it is a sacred arrangement, but it is human and does not always work out,” he says. “You are free to try again. I think the process still encourages taking marriage seriously, but it doesn’t hit you over the head and say ‘you screwed up.’”

And when the husband cannot be contacted? Although the ceremony can be completed without his presence, it cannot be done without his consent. Women in such marriages are known as Agunot, or anchored women. Though a woman can go through a Beit Din and sue for a Get if her husband is abusive or for other compelling reasons, in the end the husband must grant the divorce of his own free will. Mutual consent is required.

And other Jews, like Rachel Stern of San Antonio, Texas, choose not to have a Get at all.

“I had no desire to, because if you’re a liberal Jew, your egalitarian Ketubah [marriage contract] is not seen as valid to the Orthodox authority,” she says. Orthodox rabbis do not recognize egalitarian forms of marriage contracts; however, they do believe traditional Ketubot are valid. “The Reform do not give Gets. You have to go to the Orthodox [rabbis] to invalidate a marriage they see as invalid.”

If a woman gets remarried without a Get, then any future children would be seen as illegitimate under Jewish law. With children from their first marriage, Stern and her new husband decided this would not

be an issue in their relationship.

Fortunately for Stern, she has “the luxury of the moral high ground,” she says, and her ex-husband, a Reform rabbi, says he would provide a Get if she ever wanted one.

“You should know about any Jewish ritual you participate in,” Stern says.
aliza WEINBERGER